This week on the podcast we're powering up your brain, making your online life more secure with two-factor authentication, and figuring out why everyone's pissed at Twitter. Also, we're answering your questions about home automation, Linux on Macs, and a diet that actually helps you put on weight.

How to Listen to This Week's Episode

News and Discussion

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Everywhere You Should Enable Two-Factor Authentication
Two-factor authentication has been in the news a lot lately, so you might be wondering which services offer it and which don't. Here's your answer.

Power Up Your Brain at a Moment's Notice
Sometimes you feel anti-social or want to procrastinate, but you need to go out or get things done nonetheless. You can solve that problem by playing tricks on your brain. They only take a couple of minutes and can help you gain just enough motivation to do what you need to do.

Why's Everyone Pissed at Twitter?
Twitter made a few decisions recently that pissed off a lot of people. The decisions mainly revolved around them wanting to make money at the cost of edging out the third-party developers that helped make their service great. This is unfortunate and a lot of people are upset. Should you care? Find out.

Questions and Answers

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Each week we answer five questions from readers and listeners. Here's what we tackled this week.

What's a good home automation system for handling a ton of lights?X10 is the industry standard and offers a fairly inexpensive solution. You can just plug lights into it and it communicates over the power lines. Apps for your smartphone or desktop are available to make things easier, but you can also purchase hardware controllers. The technology is pretty old so there are many options available. If you use an iPhone (or other iDevice), you can grab a Belkin WeMo or two. These are easy to set up and have a lot of great bonus features. Right now you need to have an iDevice to use them, so that's a fairly significant downside, but hopefully the WeMo line will grow into a simple but broadly-supported home automation system in the near future.

Why don't I get a boot menu when trying to boot my Mac into Linux?
There may be something wrong with your computer if you're unable to get a boot menu, but you don't want to use OS X's boot menu to get into Linux anyhow. If something's wrong, get it fixed through Apple first, and then follow this guide.

What's a diet that can help me gain weight?
Eating healthily isn't all that different for someone trying to gain weight than someone trying to lose it. We've done a guide to understanding the food pyramid and using it for better eating, so that should help you out—the main idea is to eat more often during the day (six small meals, usually) and make sure your diet is full of food high in good calories, like nuts, fruits, vegetables, and lean protien. For more information this guide over at WebMD and this one over at About.com Nutrition have some good, if basic, guidelines to healthily gaining weight.

Is Soundcloud good for podcasts?
Yep, it's what we use and it's possibly the easiest way to upload a podcast I've come across. It's not perfect, and it's still in beta, but I've yet to come across something better.

Downloads of the Week

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Each week we talk about our favorite downloads. Here are our picks for this week.

Headphones (Windows/OS X/Linux)
Sickbeard does for TV shows and Couch Potato does for movies, Headphones keeps track of all the music you want and downloads it when it becomes available.

GIMP (OS X)
GIMP is a fantastic free alternative to Photoshop for all desktop operating systems, but on Mac it was a bit of a pain to set it up, because you needed to install X11. GIMP now, however, comes with a standard DMG installer.

SkyDrive (Android)
Microsoft promised an SkyDrive Android app and now they've delivered. If you've wanted to access all the files in your SkyDrive account, you now can from your Android smartphone or tablet.

Reflection (iOS)
Reflection puts your iDevice's screen on your Mac. (AirServer can also do this, and actually costs a bit less.) It works over AirPlay, but the cool thing about it that we learned this week is you can use it to broadcast your screen to anyone online using Google+ Hangouts.

Magic Lantern (Canon DSLRs)
Magic Lantern is custom firmware for select Canon DSLRs. It provides an array of advanced video and imaging features that Canon doesn't include by default. The latest update makes it even more often by providing automatic HDR bracketing, better contrast and saturation adjustments, in-depth image analysis, and the coolest part: no-hassle time lapse videos. (To learn how to use Magic Lantern, read our guide.)

How Do I Submit a Question?

Please keep your questions as brief as possible. This means about 3-5 sentences for emails and 30-60 seconds for calls and videos. Your questions can be specific, but broader questions are generally better because they'll apply to more people. For example, "how can I breathe new life into my old PDA?" is much better than "what can I do with an old HP iPAQ 210?" Either way, we look forward to hearing from you!